


Undertow

by OhDearGodWhatHaveIDone



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Cam knows how to sail too, Daniels an idiot, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Samantha Carter is a bad ass, Vala Needs A Hug, domestic SG1, soft Cam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:02:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23785222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OhDearGodWhatHaveIDone/pseuds/OhDearGodWhatHaveIDone
Summary: All he could think was that he was Lancelot: he had stolen Guinevere from Arthur and no one would ever be the same, not king, queen, knight, or country.complete work
Relationships: Vala Mal Doran/Cameron Mitchell
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First published on ff.net back in 2009 I think this is my favourite thing I ever wrote. I was ALWAYS a Daniel/Vala shipper but I had written a few friendship bits between these two and decided to explore a romantic angle to them. Maybe it's transfer from their days on Farscape but it's so easy to see these two together.

She first came to him on what turned out to be a Thursday night.

He had been reading an updated report on Ori troop movement for the last few hours and hadn't gotten past the third sentence, and he didn't like them very much. A migraine was forming in the back of his head and she was knocking his door for the second time when he heard her.

He had left the common room a few hours earlier when the tension had gotten too much and he could no longer bear to stare out into the vastness of space, the fact that the ship's environmental controls were acting up because of damage to the ship had helped also. He remembered seeing her on his way out, a wisp in a blue shirt that was the colour of the sky when he flew so high that he seemed to be the only living thing. She had been running towards Daniel's office with a stack of notes and books.

And now she was here.

She stood against his open door which he hadn't bothered to lock. He was just too tired to remember. They were all too tired these days.

"Vala," He said as she looked back at him, her face pale with the cold that now permeated the ship, "What are you doing here?"

She handed him a folder with more papers in it, "Daniel wanted you to have these."

He took the folder from her and for the first time realised she was wearing gloves, looking up from her hand he noticed that she was bundled up in a huge overcoat as well. Where she had gotten it from he didn't know, but the fact she had it didn't surprise him. Vala didn't do well in the cold, everyone knew that. In the heat she seemed to glow while they sweated and her hair would curl when others would frizz, but in the cold she was the first one to turn into a human icicle.

"He forgot to give them to you earlier." She said between slightly chattering teeth.

"Thanks."

She gave him a smile that in no way resembled her usual grin. There were dark circles under her eyes that even her makeup couldn't cover, and she looked too tired to make it back to either her own quarters or to Daniel's office.

"You want to come in and warm up for a minute, Princess?" He had been one of the lucky few to snatch up a portable heater for his quarters.

Vala looked like she was going to refuse for a moment then she just nodded and stepped inside, "I wasn't quick enough to get a heater and now I can't even beg, borrow or steal one."

"So Daniel sent you out to run errands for him?" he asked as he cranked up the heater another notch, it never failed to annoy Cam how much Daniel seemed to be leaning on Vala these days.

"You know Daniel." She said vaguely as she looked around his quarters. There wasn't much to see, the only personal item in the whole room apart from his clothing was a small CD player and speakers.

"You want something hot to drink?" He was actually happy to spend time with just her, usually the only time he saw her was when they were on a mission or with the rest of the team. But he had always admired Vala and the way she seemed to go wherever life took her, knowing it might be dangerous but going ahead anyway and leaving a Vala-shaped hole in her wake.

She hit the play button on the CD player and her shock was clear on her face when Vivaldi sounded out instead of the country music she was expecting.

Looking across the room she spotted the muddle of papers on his bed she spoke again, "You're trying to work, Cameron. I should go." Her eyes looked greyer and duller than he could ever remember and he was sure it wasn't just the bright blue of her shirt that was causing the effect.

"No, really, it's fine." He scrubbed his hand over his face as his own tiredness began to take over, "I could do with a break."

"Sure?" She asked, her fore head wrinkling with a small frown.

"Yeah, tea?" He knew even though Daniel consumed coffee by the gallon Vala had never embraced it.

"Thank you." She said with a sigh as she sank down onto the small corner of his bed that wasn't overrun with papers.

As he poured the drink for her the CD changed from Vivaldi to a cello piece he could never remember the name of.

"I've never heard this before." She told him as she removed her gloves to accept the mug and shrugged at his confused look, "Daniel isn't really into music." She offered by way of explanation.

They sat in silence for awhile, something Cam didn't think she was capable of, and he could see her gently tapping her fingers against her mug along to the rhythm. He had to blink to make sure that it was really Vala he was looking at, he had never seen her like this before, so calm and collected but if it was simply exhaustion that was causing it, he couldn't say.

"My grandma use to listen to this," He told her unexpectedly, "I used to stay with her Saturday nights and on Sunday mornings she would play some classic station on the radio before we went to church." He didn't know why he was telling her this.

Her teeth started chattering again and Cam went and grabbed a sweatshirt from his kit bag. "Here, put this on."

She smiled weakly in thanks as she pulled it over her head, the thing swamped her small frame and as she lifted her arms he caught a glimpse of her pale stomach and decided not to comment on the shadows he caught of her ribs. She looked so young sitting there that he felt ancient beside her, only her eyes told the same story as his.

"How's the report?" She asked.

"It's… informative." He didn't want to tell her that he hadn't started reading it because her face would do that crinkle thing again and she would go back out into the coldness of the ship before he could stop her. It surprised him that he didn't want her to leave any time soon.

"Well how about I sit here and heat up while you finish that and then you can tell me how deep in it we really are."

He chuckled slightly. She was obviously feeling a bit better if she could crack a joke however dark it turned out to be. He moved his stuff to one side and allowed her to lean back against the headboard beside him. He heard her breath even out beside him as he read through the pages and when he looked over her head had fallen back and the small wrinkles round her eyes had softened in her sleep. Grabbing the blanket from the bottom of the bed he pulled it over her before switching off the main lights and went back to his reading.

"Cam?" Her voice was laced with sleep and made him think of honeycombs, "What time is it?"

"Late, Princess, go back to sleep."

She gave a half sigh, half groan as she kicked off her shoes and curled up under the blanket and within a few pages she had drifted back off. When he finally finished his report he didn't bother to turn off the light, just shut his eyes and within moments he too was asleep.

He was brushing his teeth when she woke the next morning.

She sat up in his bed, all sensuous lines and warm colours, her hair wild from sleep and his jumper swimming around her.

"Sleep okay?" He asked once he had rinsed his mouth out.

"Very well," She said with much more than a hint of a smile as she crossed the room towards him, "Thank you, Cam."

He looked away from her, not used to seeing this side of her and not knowing what to make of it, "Yeah well, couldn't have you freezing your ass of, Daniel would have a fit."

She cocked her head to the side as if contemplating what Daniel's reaction would be to losing her, "And then where would the world be without Daniel Jackson coming to the rescue?" There was a little more bite to her words than he had ever heard in her voice when she talked about Daniel.

Cam brushed it off, "You want a shower or something?" She shook her head no in response, "Sure? I've got clean towels and everything."

She laughed that deep throaty laugh that she usually saved for Daniel, "You certainly know the way to win a woman's heart, don't you, Cameron"

But in all the years he'd known her and on every planet across the galaxy, he'd never seen anyone that could truly win hers. He suspected not even Daniel had managed that task yet.

"Cam?"

"Yeah?"

She pointed to his jaw and he wiped a finger across it, finding some toothpaste still there, "Better?"

She came closer to him and ran her finger over the same spot. There was nothing sexual in the gesture but her gentleness sent a shiver down his spine.

"Where would the world be without _you,_ Cameron?" She asked rhetorically as she used the towel around his neck to wipe off the rest of the mark

The world would be where it always had been, he thought darkly, with her still obsessed with a man that sent her out in the cold on his errands while he, almost positively, sat and worked beside a heater. He wasn't sure where the thought came from, but it startled him when he realised how angry he was with Daniel for always taking advantage of her.

"Thanks." He said, rather than voicing his thoughts.

And then she was gone, still wearing his oversized sweatshirt.


	2. Chapter 2

Time moved on as it always did and outside of missions, he hardly got a glimpse of Vala. She always seemed to be rushing about on errands for Daniel or helping Sam or giving a hand to Teal'c in training new recruits. They were all under pressure and tempers were beginning to fray. He couldn't understand how she kept it all together.

He was down in the control room when he heard Daniel. He wasn't quite shouting but another few decibels and he would be.

"I needed the folder on P3x-597, Vala! This briefing is important. What's wrong with you today?"

She didn't answer but Cam heard the words 'you're trying to find ways to kill my daughter' flit across his mind.

Cam saw her hurry down the stairs and he followed her down into an empty hallway. He wasn't surprised by Daniel's harsh words to her, things weren't going well and it was beginning to take its toll. But he had never heard Daniel be so cruel.

She stopped suddenly, as if sensing someone behind her and he stumbled into her back.

"Hey!" he said as she ricocheted.

When she didn't say anything and didn't turn round, he reached for her arm and pulled her towards him. She turned reluctantly and when she raised her watery eyes to him, he knew if he hadn't stopped her, she wouldn't have cried.

She looked at him and he knew suddenly why people had once called the moon the watery star. Two tears rolled silently from her reddened eyes as she looked at him and he realised she was the one person that still looked at him that way, still looked at him like he could make the world right again. He had no idea what had given her so much faith in him, but all he knew was that he couldn't disappoint her.

And then she thumped her head down on his shoulder, her black hair falling against him in waves. Cam put his arms around her and drew her closer, resting one hand on the back of her head and the other around her too thin waist. After a minute, she pulled back, wiping angrily at her face. Asking her if she was all right was stupid but he wished there was something he could do or say to make up for the great jackass Daniel was being at the moment.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice breaking. "I shouldn't be like this."

"There's nothing wrong with emotion," he told her.

She looked at him with her deep eyes; her lashes blinked wetly. She was such a tough, fragile, beautiful creature. "Thank you."

Cam nodded and didn't say a word as she turned back around and continued on her way.

She came to him a day later, Sam dropping her off.

"I wanted to bring this back," She said, handing him the folded sweatshirt as he held his apartment door open. It smelled of the washing powder the on-base laundry used.

"You had it washed." He noticed and felt about as brilliant as Shakespeare in his power of observation.

"Yeah," she said and looked at him oddly, a smile curling at her lips.

"You didn't have to."

"If it makes you feel better, I had to do my own laundry. I've got a bit more spare time while Daniel's in England."

And that was the way things went. Daniel went off to do research and left Vala to do much of his on-base work trapped underground. Cam wanted to tell her it didn't matter, that all it did was rain in England and she would be stuck in libraries and hotel rooms the whole time if Daniel had bothered to take her with him. He wanted to ask her to come sailing with him this weekend, to show her that the colour of the sky could meld with the colour of the water until it looked like a dream and that if you reached down and touched it, then it felt like a kiss. But he didn't and they just stood there in silence.

"Come on in." He told her after a long pause.

She looked at him with serious eyes that he could drown in if only he let himself.

In that moment Cam knew he wanted to drown.

She came inside.

"You finally convince them you would go insane if you didn't get off the base?"

She laughed and raised an eyebrow at him, "Daniel gave me his spare key on the condition I didn't break anything while he was away. He said I could go over if I wanted."

There was so much more in those words than he expected to understand. She could be a million places, but the fact was, she was here.

"What's it like to sail, Cam?" she asked when he didn't say anything. She was looking at the large painting of a sailing boat that hung above his couch.

"It's amazing," he answered simply. "It's like living a dream where nothing goes wrong and you don't wake up. It's like being free." Cam loved to fly but sailing would always have a special place in his heart. It was something he had done with his grandfather when he was a child.

She nodded looked back at the picture on his wall, "It sounds wonderful."

"I'll take you," he offered, the words jumping out before he could stop them.

"Cam… " She grinned at him, a little self-consciously, and then took a deep breath.

He wanted to be noble for her and he wanted her, if not in his bedroom then at least on his couch.

She saw what he wanted in his eyes but she also saw his hesitation. "Daniel?" she asked, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear in a gesture that made her seem young in spite of her perceptiveness that gave away her age.

He nodded just slightly and began to turn away from her "I don't want you doing this because of Daniel, or the way he's been acting."

She stopped him with her hand on his. "I never was," she told him. "Were you?"

Cam shook his head. He wanted her for many reasons, but Daniel never entered one of them. When she touched him, he felt her certainty and yet he needed to believe it was more than just a certainty of the moment.

"Vala, I don't want a one-night stand," he said, trying to keep his tone level when each syllable felt like he was speaking his last words.

"Neither do I," she answered clearly.

In all that followed, he would remember her in that moment, how she looked with her cheeks flushed and her heart pounding through her shirt, the way she smelled like softness and warmth, and the grace as she ran her fingers over his hand, wound them together, and hoped with eyes the colour of storm.

"You know the powers that be won't tolerate more."

"I know," she answered and she kissed him and he kissed her back, at first lightly, and then her tongue and his twisted and he shivered when she ran the tip across the roof of his mouth.

Everything slowed to a maddeningly adagio as they shed their clothes and fell into the thin dimness of his bedroom and the depths of his dark bed. He kissed her all over as her hands smoothed over his skin as if she was working clay and he swore he could feel every indent and ridge of her fingerprints. He marvelled at the way her bones contorted and shifted under her flesh as she slid against him and they shed their underwear so that there was nothing between them but this sudden slick sweat.

When he turned to his night table and fumbled through the drawer, nearly falling off the bed, she laughed. It sounded like sunflowers in the wind and he laughed with her, fishing out a condom and rolling himself back into the bed.

"Been a while?" Vala asked, leaning on one arm and arching an eyebrow at him in a manner Teal'c would have been proud of.

"Too long," he breathed into her ear as he gathered her to his heart.

Afterwards, Vala looked up at him with her eyes the colour of lupines at full, iridescent bloom, the kind he had seen scattered across fields as a child. Purple was the colour of nobility, of magic, of battle-worn hearts.

"Do you regret it?" she asked into the silence and he felt the whole world hinge on one answer now that the sex was done and real things like consequences took over again.

"Yes," he answered her as gently as he could, his southern drawl now more pronounced, "There's no such thing as no regrets." he explained as she rolled up on one arm to look at him. "I regret not fighting for you sooner."

"Vala?" he asked as she faced him. "What I said about the one night stand? I meant it."

"What I said about Daniel? I meant it too."

He leaned down around her as she wrapped herself around him and she was more than halfway towards him when he kissed her.

He hadn't been sure the first time she had said it, because the misdirection that followed had been a classic Vala move, and because he wanted her so badly and ignobly that he wanted her no matter how short the time was. But when she curled around him and held him, her thin form sprawled into his and her eyes trusting and honest, he believed her.

Cam closed his own eyes and when he woke that way with her in his arms a while later, he remembered his dreams had been of lupines in great swathes of fields with children running and laughing and tumbling. He smiled as he realized he hadn't dreamed like that in a very long time.

The next day he dropped her back on the base and she tumbled back into the madness that she had created for herself. He understood that now, that she made the whirlwind that was her life. With no real job while they were on Earth and people constantly trying to find ways to kill her lost daughter she had no way of coping other than keeping as busy as possible.

And he was fine without her beside him, really he was. They had only spent one night together and it wasn't as if he had never done that before. He wasn't a melancholy romantic from the nineteenth century; he could still be the dashing, witty, charming Cameron Mitchell when she wasn't near him. He went to briefings, trained in the gym, paid his bills and every so often remembered that coffee wasn't a food group.

But he could still smell her unique sent of apples and sin (he wasn't even going to try and work out the significance of _that_ particular thought) on the passenger seat of his car, and her silver necklace was still sitting on his end table. He wasn't dying but he missed her every time he passed the mess and saw an empty cup of tea. When they sat at the briefing table together he had to stop himself from asking her if she still wanted to go sailing with him.

He bought two classical music CDs and slipped them under her door.

He stayed on base later than he needed to in the vain hope that he might catch her alone.

He could still make bad decisions without her; good ones, too. But at times his mind would wander and he couldn't tell if it had simply been a night of comfort for them both or if it had really meant more.

He was reading another status report and trying to ignore the burning in his eyes. He was tired and knew that if he wanted to stay any later he would need to go get some more coffee. But he didn't because he was focusing on the can of worms he had opened with Vala Mal Doran and thinking of where it might lead.

"It's almost midnight," She told him as she stood in his doorway.

"What are you still doing up?"

"I had some notes to do for Daniel for the morning" She said, waving in the general direction of Daniel's office. A weight was on her shoulders that hadn't been there a few days ago and when she looked him in the eye something inside him broke a little.

She motioned back down the corridor with her head and turned away from him, expecting him to follow. He switched off his lamp and quickened his pace to catch up with her. No one paid them any attention as they walked to her quarters.

"Cam." Her voice was soft in the empty hall way; anyone staying on base tonight had long since gone to bed. She closed the door behind them and he felt the space between them evaporate as she kissed him.

She stepped towards the bed and suddenly everything was awkward and the space between them too wide. There wasn't even five feet between them but Cam wasn't sure how to cross the space. He knew there was a way but he didn't know what it was.

Across from him Vala simply pulled her black top over her head and he watched in fascination at the little sparks of static that crackled in her hair, far more beautiful than any starscape he had ever seen.

He took his lead from her and by the time he was at her side she was pulling his t-shirt from him and over her own head.

She fell asleep twisted into him and he lay there, propped on his bent arm, watching her. He had seen her doze before and sleep off-world, but she had always looked hurried and tense and when she startled awake, she looked guilty. Now there was a peace in watching her sleep that reminded him of iambic pentameter, where words were measured and breathed together and everything that encompassed the world fit into one single line of prose.

He watched her until he could hear the footsteps begin to come more regularly down the corridor and he knew morning had come. Ever so gently he ran a finger along her jaw and up to stroke her hair before returning his hand to its resting place on her hip.

"I can feel you watching me." She said it quietly, without moving or opening her eyes and he could hear the lazy smile in her voice.

"I thought you felt my touch."

"That too," she said and her voice was drifting with sleep.

"Want me to stop?" He was already fifteen minutes past his usual waking hour when he would rise and dress and hurry into the quiet base, before the rest of the staff arrived.

"No," she answered simply, yawning so that he felt the puffs of her exhalation against his skin. She curled to him and her skin was cool, the way it would feel after a dive into the ocean. "Five more minutes," she begged as her hand wound in his.

"Ok," he said, and wrapped himself around her.

Sam would arrive before him, and Carolyn, probably even Landry would get there before he made an appearance. And when he gave Vala five additional minutes of his own, until he knew the sky outside was fading from blue to sunburst, he knew Teal'c would be in the mess, and Daniel would be looking for her before they rose.

He managed to sneak out without being caught, feeling like a teenager again as he made his way to the locker room for a change of clothes.

He passed Sam on the way and she gave him a strange look, "You look happy for someone that spent the night in his office."

He wasn't just happy; he was exalted, exuberant, inspired. Sam walked off; shaking her head and muttering something about how all bets were off in the universe since Cam was in not just a tolerable mood, but by all appearances, a middling to ecstatically jolly mood, on a Wednesday morning as he headed off towards the locker room and mess hall coffee.


	3. Chapter 3

The alarm screeched the next Monday morning and Cam fumbled from under the covers to turn it off. After a few seconds, he managed to shut it off and shrugged back under the sheets.

"Vala," he whispered.

She squirmed against him and ducked her head under the blankets. Vala was not a morning person, especially after a weekend of intimacy.

But Cam was wide awake.

He scrunched down under the blankets with her, pulled the navy linen sheets over his head too so that his forehead and hers were touching. Her arms were pulled up across her chest and she was curled against him so that her breath lulled against his face.

Gently, he inched down and began kissing her forearms, where the bones turned and twisted against each other. He heard the quick intake of her breath, felt the slight shifting of her weight as she leaned towards him, and even in the dimness of their tented world, he could see the fluttering of her eyelids that belied she was awake.

His fingers wrapped around hers and laced them together as he drew her arms down and kissed her shoulder blade, and then the joint of her shoulder blade where it met her collarbone, tracing the slight dip in her warm skin with the tip of his tongue.

She twined her leg between his, anchoring herself to him as he kissed up her neck to the fine line of her cheek, tugging on the corner of her ear as she rolled slightly and he leaned his weight down on her warm chest, her breasts pressed against his sternum as he kissed her temple and down to her nose and hovered over her for a second so that she opened her eyes before he kissed her lips.

He didn't see her after that morning. Landry kept him busy with reports and when he thought he was done at 9pm Teal'c dragged him down to the gym for sparring practice. Cam gritted his teeth and went.

Later that night Cam stood in the shower with anger pouring off him.

Daniel had come into the gym and sat whingeing about Vala's new passion for music, it was a distraction, he said. Cam had kept the thought to himself that Vala should be allowed to experience more than just what Daniel exposed her to, which in reality wasn't all that much. The weekends she spent at his house she had begun to devour his book and music collections. Cam found it refreshing to see things that were so familiar to him through her eyes; she had no preconceived ideas about anything.

He had to excuse himself when, after a particularly harsh comment from Daniel, he had hit Teal'c a little two hard with his staff. He had received strange looks from the other two but had passed it off as stress and they had believed him.

He so desperately wanted to see Vala again tonight but he knew that their schedules didn't work well with relationships. That was why he wasn't going to go and knock on her door at almost 1am, especially when he knew how exhausted she was.

He made his way out to the elevator intent on going home and forgetting his disappointment.

"Cam." She called softly, half standing in the shadows in her bare feet, hair falling down her back.

It was all he needed to hear to put the smile back on his face.

By the end of the month they where almost living together, although working at the SGC they had practically been living together for years. During the week they would sleep in her quarters on base and then on Friday evening, Sam would drop her off at Cam's house. Sam never asked what went on between them and when she saw Vala on Monday morning for breakfast, she kept her own counsel since she also knew, or thought she knew, that Vala was hopelessly in love with an oblivious Daniel.

It took another month before Cam brought up the subject of Vala living off base with Landry. The general had been reluctant at first but after the assurances of the rest of her team and since it was Cam rather than Daniel that had put in the request he relented. After all, Cam had no reason to want Vala living off base beside the fact she had earned the right.

So Vala got a small apartment, although she rarely used it. She went and picked up her mail and watered the few plants she had been given as house warming gifts. The place was kept tidy, but not too tidy, so that if Sam wanted to come over, it looked like she really lived there, but that was it.

She was a better actor than he was, but he put that down to her time as a con artist. He would see her across the briefing room, sitting next to Daniel, and want to touch her. He would notice that mane of black hair go running down a corridor and want to call her name. One time he found her alone in Daniel's office humming Vivaldi under her breath and all Cam could think of was how much he wanted to kiss her. Then Daniel walked in calling her name and she looked up. She didn't look at Daniel, though. She looked at Cam and in her eyes he saw the stars.

He would come home and sometimes she would be there before him, sometimes he would be there before her. They would cook together, or rather, he would cook or she would order take out, but he always made sure she had at least one proper meal a day and now he could no longer see those shadows of her ribs he had noticed so long ago. Cam found he liked curry and that she was the only person he knew that knew how to eat with chopsticks.

He would come home and call it home, not the place he kept his stuff while he was at the SGC. He told her on Thursday that they were out of garbage bags and she had simply looked at him from under her hair while she blow dried it and asked if he wanted the big ones or the little ones. One day he had come home and she was singing along to 'Penny Lane' in the kitchen while she attempted to make him dinner.

A wilted violet plant had appeared on his kitchen windowsill, in a plastic pot and a huge pottery saucer that had the name Maude glazed on it in iridescent turquoise. In a week, Maude was proudly sprouting feathery pink and white flowers. Suddenly there was colour in his rooms that had never been there before. It was the way she was.

She liked curling herself up in an armchair and reading his books. He had an eclectic collection that ranged from childhood friends to college enemies. Unlike Daniels library his was mostly fiction and he loved nothing more than watching Vala's face when she came across her new 'favourite book ever'. It had taken her a while to get into it, her grasp of written English not as good as her spoken but he couldn't blame her for that, the woman spoke almost as many languages as Daniel did. One day on a whim he got get a collection of poetry books and at the end of the month he didn't grumble when his credit card bill came in with more charges to book stores than he could remember.

While she would be with her books Cam would sit in front of the T.V and watch what ever sport was playing. Sometimes she would sit and watch with him and he would patiently explain the rules to her and by the time the football season came around she was an expert and had declared her undying support for the New York Giants.

She wasn't the person people thought she was, the saucy minx out to get what ever she could fit in her pocket. She was Vala Mall Doran, smarter than anyone gave her credit for, tougher than any Marine on the outside, a grieving mother and lost child on the inside. She was allergic to Bananas, had loose curls in her hair if she let it air dry, had been scared of the dark when she was a child and Casablanca was the first movie she had ever seen on Earth.

When she woke up, if she woke up, she was always grumpy and when he would kiss her awake she would push him off her and not let him kiss her again until she had brushed her teeth. When she took her shower after him she would use so much hot water that his shaving mirror would fog up and he would grumble about not being able to see. She smelled of apples and he could quite happily spend the day with his head in her hair.

But then they'd go to work and save the galaxy as if nothing had changed.


	4. Chapter 4

"Why did it take us so long?" he asked aloud one night out of the blue when he couldn't stand pondering it any longer.

Vala looked up at him from where she was organizing papers for the next day. She'd been so engrossed in her task that she hadn't noticed he'd been watching her for the last seventeen minutes.

"You're my boss," she pointed out, straightening a sheaf of papers by tapping them against the end table and stapling them together. "What was I supposed to do?"

"You were supposed to be in love with Daniel," he defended.

"I know," she answered and she chewed her lip in something that reminded him of regret.

"So then, why did you come here that day?" he asked, curiosity getting the best of common sense which was a great military trait, but not so wonderful in the real world where women gave answers he didn't understand and couldn't decipher.

"Because you stopped me in the corridor and you just looked at me and I saw it in your eyes. No one's ever looked at me like that before." he last part she said so slowly he could hear the truth between every syllable. "Why did you?"

"Because I hoped," he said so honestly he realized he had almost forgotten what honesty felt like, that clean jab that could slice you to the bone and deeper. "Because I hoped there was hope."

She was silent as what he said sank in.

"I can never promise you normal hours, free weekends, the usual holidays, dinners out, movies in, or all the other sane things most people do." He told her honestly.

"If you can't give it, I don't want it."

"But you should," he protested, rattled by her words and her remarkable calm and certainty in saying them. He had kept his certainty reined in for years and knew it well, but hers flustered him because it was so true and it meant only one thing, that she wasn't in love with Daniel, hadn't been for some time if she ever had been at all, because she was in love with someone else.

Vala put the papers in the stack and closed the file, padding over on her knees to where he was sitting on the couch. When she took his hands and then kissed him, he knew she wasn't lying; she really didn't want those things. And that was when he finally wondered if she was right; if there was some admirable part in the sinking black morass of his lost soul.

"I just wanted to see you," Cam said innocently as he dragged her out of Daniels office for lunch.

"That's all you wanted?"

"Yes." He didn't, but that was beyond the point.

"You know we can't, Cam." She told him as his fingers ghosted along her back as they walked down the corridor.

"It doesn't mean I want it any less." He also knew he didn't have to tell her that it wasn't really that they couldn't have it, but that it was the price they would have to pay for it.

So far they were doing a good job of having what they couldn't have.

Three hours later he pulled her into a darkened corner as they prepared to go off world and kissed her until her toes curled in her boots.

"Cam, you know we can't do this." She whispered breathlessly.

"But we are." He defended, and she knew he was right.

The candle beside him guttered out and he cursed, the words echoing off the living room walls. Outside thunder rolled its way across the city, taking out power lines as it went. He'd left the base just as the first set of storms were sliding through and had been drenched by the first shower before even getting to his car. He drove home sopping wet through rain so hard it bounced off the ground in ricochets. Before he'd gotten the door to his apartment open, the city had gone black and Vala had lit the four candles that they had in the house.

And now Cam was trying to read yet another report on planets the Ori had taken, needless to say it wasn't going well.

Vala sat in her armchair, her face was wreathed in flames like tiger lily petals as the pages of a book flickered through her fingers. It was a copy of ' _The Great Gatsby'_ his mother had given him on his sixteenth birthday. In the background of the guttering candles, he could hear the swirl of the pages as she turned through Daisy's life and Gatsby's devotion, the echo of thunder as it slid over the sky.

He watched her for a while and couldn't understand how Daniel could push this beautiful, fragile, tough woman so far away while he couldn't get her close enough. He wanted her close enough so that he couldn't ever forget this was why he was in the military, that this was what he was protecting.

"What do you think?" he asked and it was only when he called her name that she blinked and looked up at him. He grinned. "Where are you?"

She cast her eyes back down at the black printed lines. "He has an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again."

Vala read in a clear voice that gave off mellifluous undertones and firm remonstrance.

He sat and watched her until she had finished the book and the candles where almost done.

"What did you think of the end?"

"It's not about _an_ end or even how it ends," she said, coming to sit next to him, her brow furled as she tried to compose her thoughts, "It's about hope, the vindication of hope and the hope of vindication."

He smiled as he pulled her into his lap. He knew she was right, not just about the book but also this night and them.

He went to the gym for several hours early one Saturday morning to let her sleep and he'd returned to a yawning, hungry Vala who had by various not-so-clear ways enchanted him into making pancakes at two hours past noon and had the game on TV. She had mixed the batter while wearing one of his old t-shirts that fell just to the top of her thighs, and had threatened him with the batter-dipped whisk when his hands ventured up and under the shirt. They were both laughing for no specific reason and it felt wonderful.

After fending off his advances, she had stationed him in front of the sizzling frying pan and changed into jeans and shirt while he poked at the dollop of lumpy beige glop with the spatula and flipped it, sending a hail of batter drops across the stove. Dubiously, he shoveled out the misshapen pancake and Vala poured another cup of batter into the pan. Before he could turn around, she was already eating the first product of his labors, one that not even his Aunt Jemima would claim, slathering it with a layer of peanut butter he didn't even know they had and then rolling into a wrap.

She did the same for pancake number two.

"Are you going to leave me any?" he asked, hands on his hips as she got two bites into her third peanut butter pancake wrap and the count was Vala 3, Cam 0.

Vala stared at him, her cheeks bulged like a chipmunk's guiltily, and with great difficulty swallowed. He watched the lump sink down her throat and prayed between the dough and the sticky peanut butter, she didn't choke.

"That one's yours," she said with a wicked grin on her face, pointing around him to the one in the frying pan. "The one that's burning."

Cam turned and flipped it over in a spray of butter and oil. One side was definitely more black than brown.

She looked at him so innocently.

He kissed her and she tasted like peanut butter and suddenly he wanted to try a pancake with peanut butter. He set the spatula down on the batter-speckled counter as she leaned into him, not caring about his pancake because charcoal was good for the digestion and because she was sitting on a stool in his kitchen and they were kissing and making deformed pancakes that probably weren't fully cooked and because it was so perfect.

He would have kept kissing through the burnt smell and the batter marks his fingers left on her cheeks and the game he wasn't all that interested in on TV, except that the phone rang.

He sighed and Vala laughed, hopping off the stool and rescuing the frying pan from the heat as he dug out his cell phone. He could hear her scraping the burnt pancake into the trash.

"Vala, it's your phone," he said, grabbing the other Nokia from the end table. She set the pan down on the sink and he could feel her reluctance to take the ringing thing. She did though, answering it curtly as he sprayed the pan again with no-stick and poured another cup of batter onto the heat.

"Daniel," she said with dismay and she stopped looking at him.

"I'm at home," she answered brightly, but her voice sounded a little strained. "I didn't hear the other phone."

Cam's smile tightened as she turned away from him and paced to the other end of the kitchen.

"You knocked?" she asked suddenly and there was more than surprise in her tone, a little hostility at invasion. "At my apartment?"

Everything stopped. The world falling down made the same sound as a mosquito buzzing close to his ear, the dreadful bloodsucking sound of beating wings and jaws that slurped out your soul in one careful incision.

"I was probably in the shower," she explained easily. "You know, personal hygiene and all, Daniel. I'm not lying, Daniel. Where else do you think I'd be? Ok? All right. Fine. I'll be there in twenty minutes."

Cam turned to her, already knowing because that was how the SGC worked. There was a smudge of batter along the side of the phone from where he'd marked her like a coup on her cheek.

"Does he know?"

She shook her head and then she looked straight into him with her silver eyes.

"Are you sure?"

She didn't shake her head that time. "And what's going to happen when they do find out about us sleeping together?" she bit out.

"Does it matter?" he'd asked though he knew it did.

Vala just stared at him and then chuffed in disbelief.

"Yeah, I think it matters at little," she said. "You're my boss."

"I know that," Cam replied evenly.

"Then maybe you should start caring about what this relationship looks like instead of what it is."

"This isn't about sex," Cam returned, suddenly on the defensive.

"Yeah?" Vala questioned as her fingers curled white around the cell phone. "Then why do I feel like I've just been fucked?"

When he didn't say anything, she just shook her head. "I have to go." she said, washing her hands under the faucet and wiping her face with a paper towel.

It seemed as though the world had suddenly split in half. Not five minutes ago, they'd been laughing and here she was walking out his door, the muffled echoes of her jogging down the stairs ringing in his ears.

But she came back.

He got up from the couch as she flicked on a light. He'd been sitting there so long his eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness.

"You were right," he told her because she was. And then he handed her what he'd been holding.

"What is it?" she asked, thrown off guard.

"Open it."

She opened the nondescript bag and pulled out the DVD inside with Bogart and Bergman on the cover.

"It was on this afternoon, but you weren't here," he explained. "So I…"

Vala threw her arms around him. "I'm sorry," she whispered and he knew she was sorry for being right. He was sorry they had ever felt wrong because holding her like that in his arms was one of the rightest things he knew.

She fed in the DVD and they ate the pancakes he'd saved from the morning, and he was even brave enough to try one with peanut butter the way she liked them. It wasn't half bad, he told her as they watched the scenes in Rick's American Café. She leaned against him as Ilsa asked her famous request, "Play it once, Sam." (She never said 'again' in the movie).

They'd watched the movie through the famous plane scene when Vala's head lolled against his shoulder, her eyes softly lidded. In the dark room, she was cast in an amber glow by the one light he had left on and her sleeping form reminded him of the smooth grace of a Neruda poem he had memorized once for a college English class.

"And now you're mine," he began whispering softly to her, "Rest with your dream in my dream. Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as sleeping amber." She asked him for the rest and he continued until the end: "The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny. Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all."

"That's beautiful," she said without opening her eyes as he lifted her and carried her to their bed.

He came back late Wednesday night from working out at the gym, still in his Adidas shorts and sweaty t-shirt, lugging his gym bag after him. She was curled up on his couch flipping through an ancient text and making notes; a Brahms sonata was on in the background and he could smell apples on the air so that he knew she had just showered. He dropped the gym bag in the closet without bothering to dig out the damp towel inside. In the distance he could hear the dryer rumbling with a fresh load of clothes as he went over to the couch and leaned over to kiss her.

"Mmm," he whispered as he ran his tongue over her lower lip.

"Mmm," she mocked flippantly, "Sweaty Cameron."

"Uh huh," he agreed as he ran his hand through her damp hair and she opened her mouth to his kiss, her tongue dancing against his.

"Shower first, Sweaty Cam."

"Why," he whined at her. "I'll just get sweaty again."

"Yeah, but you smell."

"Thank you, dear."

"No problem, darling."

She was giggling, her finger in the binding of the pages where she'd been reading. She was wearing his terry robe and though things weren't back to where they had been between them since the argument, they were getting there.

"I ordered Thai again," she called as he headed towards the bathroom, flicking on the light and leaving the door open.

He could barely hear her voice as he turned on the faucets and water gushed out of the shower. She'd left the cap open to her shampoo and the room smelled of apples.

She kept talking in the background but he couldn't hear what she said. He rinsed the shampoo out of his hair, careful not to use Vala's as he had once and smelled of apples all day so that even Teal'c had noticed. He shut off the water and towelled himself off just as the doorbell rang.

"I'll get it," she called and he heard her padding across the floor for the food. He slipped into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans and a black tee just as he heard, "I don't believe this," and easy as that, his world fell apart.

Vala had the door open, his blue terry robe belted twice around her waist and falling almost to her knees.

"Daniel," she said.


	5. Chapter 5

Cam came up behind her, and Daniel stared at him dumbly. Vala glanced back at him once and then kept her eyes on Daniel. She was wearing his bathrobe, her hair was just slightly damp and down, her lips just-kissed, and her cheeks pink from where his stubble had rubbed at her. It was damning.

Daniel stared at her and Cam saw it hit in his eyes, saw his world break and fall apart too.

That made two of them.

He stood in the doorway in his clothes from work trying to make sense of what he was seeing and failing to get there.

"Daniel," Vala said and he focused on her like he always did when his world began it collapse. "What did you need?"

He couldn't stammer a coherent reply as the Thai deliveryman rounded the stairs, out of breath as always, his toupee askew and his cell phone glowing on his belt. Ricardo was at least fifty and he was always the one that delivered, calling Vala "Mrs. Cam" so that she'd laugh.

He barged right into the middle of them and at any other time it would have been funny. Vala had the money rolled in her hand and she handed it to him as Daniel had to step back. Ricardo chattered on and on, but as she took the two brown bags, he took one look at their faces, bid them goodnight and left.

"I'll let you two talk." she said as she turned and took the bags into the kitchen. Cam heard her set them down on the counter with a heavy thump.

He looked back at Daniel.

"I don't believe it," Daniel said, running a hand through his hair without really knowing what he was doing.

"What did you need?" Cam asked.

"Uh," Daniel said and Cam could see him struggling to think back. His face was still tan from the few days they'd spent off world last week. "Your cell was off."

"Daniel."

Suddenly Daniel's attention returned and the cold anger of reality sunk in like oil seeping across his retinas. He straightened his back and stared at Cam. "We have a briefing at 7 tomorrow morning."

He turned his back and started down the hall. Cam went out after him, calling his name and asking what the briefing was about, but Daniel just raised his hand and kept going.

Vala was waiting when he closed the door.

She had changed into jeans and a grey shirt and was standing with her arms crossed in the centre of his living room, her hair pulled back into a ballet dancer's bun so that it made her look strained and serious.

The apartment smelled like curry and the smell got into his nostrils so that it smelled like he was breathing fire. And all he could think was that he was Lancelot: he had stolen Guinevere from Arthur and nothing would ever be the same, not king, queen, knight, or country.

Vala was still standing there.

He couldn't lie to her. His only sin was Lancelot's, of loving too deeply, now, then, and forever.

"Well, that's the beginning of the end," he said quietly.

Cam turned off the alarm before it sounded the next morning. Vala didn't move but he knew she was awake, if she'd slept at all last night. He hadn't; he'd spent it holding her as close as he could and watching the sky brighten with blues that reminded him of bruises.

"Cameron," she said as he threw back the sheets. "You know, he might not say anything."

She was so beautiful in the swirling light. It was as if the room was dizzy with bottled water. Swollen breakers seemed to crash over them both and he knew he couldn't yet tell her about the undertow, how it swallowed you whole into the sinking black depths of the ocean. He leaned down on the mattress with his clenched fists and she reached up to kiss him. That was how he knew Daniel wouldn't let her go.

No one in their right mind would let her go.

Because in the end, Daniel was Gatsby and Vala had fallen short of Daisy. It wasn't solely her own fault, but his as well, because she stopped waiting and in doing so, fallen far short of his dreams. She had rewritten the book with a different ending than Fitzgerald and Daniel couldn't understand.

They went to the SGC together, not because Daniel had seen them, but because they had been doing it since Vala had first moved off base. He stopped at Starbucks and bought her a cup of tea. They cleared security together and walked through the maze of corridors until she split off towards her old quarters and he kept walking to his office.

She was already sitting there when he turned up for the briefing.

"Six more Jaffa and human worlds have gone over willingly to the Ori," Landry told them with no preamble, he sighed and turned to Cam once he had looked over the briefing summery, "What do you think?"

There was a heavy pause as he considered what to say next and fought back the urge to simply say 'we're screwed'. But then he remembered how that day in the corridor Vala had looked at him as if he had all the answers and that he couldn't disappoint her.

Cam couldn't look at Vala when he spoke and it took all his will power not to look over at Daniel, either, "These are the times that try men's souls," he said slowly. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods" His eyes flickered to Vala's briefly and he saw pride shining in them. He let out a silent breath, he hadn't disappointed her.

Everyone else was staring at him.

"Thomas Paine said that back when he was fighting for what they thought was right. They were fighting for a country and now we're fighting for a galaxy," His eyes again crossed the room and this time they locked with Daniels. "We're not sunshine patriots and we don't back down from fights, especially the good fight."

"Then let's work out how to win it, people." Landry told them.

Cam kept his gaze even as they left the room several hours later. He had done things in his life of which he wasn't proud, but loving Vala wasn't one of them and he wasn't about to be contrite to the man who had let her go.

Daniel didn't say a word but motioned him into his office.

"For her sake…" Cam began as soon as the door snicked into place and then Daniel hit him and the world blurred for a second.

"I thought you were my friend!"

"I am," Cam insisted as he turned around to face Daniel he swung at him hard enough to send him back against the doorway.

"Goddamn it, Cam! You're fucking _my_ Vala!"

" _Your_ Vala?" Cam aimed straight for Daniel's jaw not even caring about the rationality of a fistfight where anyone could walk in. Daniel twisted back at the last second and the blow pummeled down on his nose and lip and sent him careening back so hard he lost balance and toppled onto the floor. He was up in a second and came rushing at Cam when the door opened and Sam and Teal'c came in.

"That's enough," Sam commanded roughly, stepping between the two of them.

When Daniel launched another punch at Cameron, she clipped him one on the shoulder that sent him reeling off balance and reminded Cam never to get into a fight with Sam.

"He's sleeping with Vala!" Daniel growled darkly. The room went silent and nobody dared to move.

Sam managed a strained, "What?"

"Cam's screwing Vala." Daniel shook off Teal'c's restraining hand and gingerly touched his cheek. A drop of blood had trickled from where his teeth had gouged his gum. He wiped at it with his index finger, smudging it across his chin.

Cam's knuckles burned and he flexed them as slowly as he could. Daniel eyed him darkly. Hearing the scuffle, Landry stood in the now open doorway, glowering at the two.

"My office. Now" he said quietly, and turned on his heel.

Landry stared at them both from under his fierce brows, and gave the ultimatum. But it was to Cam that he said it. "End it, is that understood?"

And all he could do was nod, because he had always been the outsider to them all. He was the loner because he had no one.

Cam was their dark horse, always had been and always would be. The maverick and the renegade. He was the one they never quite trusted all the way without quite ever being able to put their finger on why.

He had fallen for Daniel's girl.

Cam and Vala were both crazy, slightly clumsy people, stumbling over boxes or high heels, who could quote random facts with a flair and who had lost their faith. They were unbelieving and unstable, but in the best of ways because they were each other's equilibrium, balance, sanity, proof-reader, take-out orderer, pancake maker, and peace.

Vala heard about the fight, as he knew she would. Cam knew there had been an immediate meeting with Daniel, Vala, and Landry that lasted a good deal longer than he felt comfortable with. But he knew that Vala had held her own and shown them her mettle. He also knew that Landry was pragmatic and realized without her, they would be without Daniel as well and that was a loss the SGC couldn't bear. And so, in the days that followed, there was white tension on the base, and everyone's voices were muted when he came around in that dark hole of terrors and secrets.

Professionally he functioned without her. His job did not include any stipulation requiring love or Vala Mal Doran in it for him to be successful. And after the ultimatum, they both continued their jobs as they had before.

But there was leftover Thai food in his refrigerator and Maude was blooming riotously on his windowsill. Her apple shampoo was still in his shower and there was a load of laundry in the dryer that no one had taken out. His shirts mingled with hers and there was a note near the door that reminded them they needed dishwasher soap.

It was only when Cam returned home and found the still rooms empty, that the peace of iambic pentameter shattered. It didn't break like glass against the floor, like a mistake, but like molten glass slipping from a glassblower's torch, as if it could be stretched and strung and hardened past breaking, past pain, past everything. And Cam was reminded of Shakespeare, who in one single line could turn the world he had created upside down and on its head.

Never, never, never, never, never.


	6. Chapter 6

He took her sailing the last Sunday in July. Ultimatum or no, he called her on Friday night and asked her to go sailing with him on Sunday and when she said yes, he heard the relief in her voice. They drove out to the lake early in the morning in his Mustang. They barely said a word to each other as Cam untied the moorings to a sailboat a friend never used, throwing the ropes onto the deck and manoeuvring out into the wide gulf of water still the colour of black pearls and oil slicks with the morning fog.

He ratcheted the sails with the swirling breeze and sent them flying out into the rising sun so that they left behind the city and the SGC. They had just gotten clear of the edges of land when the first rays of sun cleared the horizon and darted at them, slippery as golden fish. Then the melting ball rose up over them. Vala shielded her eyes as she sat on the bow and watched them skim the water towards infinite nowhere.

She wasn't really dressed appropriately for sailing and he knew in 15 minutes when they hit the open expanse of water, that he would give her his jacket and she would wear it and when he got it back there would be telltale hairs on it.

There was almost no one else out. Two fishing boats coasted by to their left, heading back towards the shore with the morning catch. Their voices were indistinct with their distance, if they were even the sailors' voices at all and not just the water talking to them.

When they got further out, the sun poured down over them in mounds and cascades of dripping light, throwing shadow and shade at odd angles on the ship. Vala edged out of the wind and walked carefully on the tilting deck to stand behind him as he spun the wheel and kept them idling forward. He watched the crashing waves and just as she moved, turned the wheel against the wave so that the ship bounced under them. Vala sprawled towards him, clutching at his shoulders to right herself on the unstable deck.

Cam turned his head back towards her. She didn't take her hands from his shoulders and instead, as he steered the smooth ship towards the straight water, slipped her arms under his and knotted them around his chest, hugging him close as she rested her head on his shoulder.

Cam took one hand off the wheel and put it over hers, running his thumb over the top of her hand, where the veins under her knuckles drifted back to her heart.

Beneath their feet, the sailboat slipped over the water, casting up spray that misted over them. He could feel Vala's pulse against his back, the way the rhythm of her body speeded up with every swell they hit, the way her grip tightened when they skidded on faster and faster, the way she loved it, the way he did.

Her chin rested on his shoulder and he twisted his head towards hers. Under her sunglasses, he saw her blink, twice, fast. Then she craned forward and kissed him quickly, and he could taste sin on her lips.

"Take the wheel," he told her and nudged her in front of him. She set her hands on the vanished wood gingerly and as the nose of the boat tumbled into a wave, the wheel spun sideways through her fingers. He caught it and righted them.

"Hold it steady," he instructed her as she wound her fingers around the grooves.

"Now what?" she asked, looking to him.

"Feel that wind behind us?" he asked, and she nodded. "Always keep the wind behind you." She looked up at the billowing sails, the way they plumped forward with the force of the breeze.

"That's what keeps you going forward," he said and she leaned back against him, bracing herself as he let go of the wheel. "Feel the current under you?" he asked, holding his hands over the wheel and showing her the way the water was moving as she nodded. "Steer with it, not against it. You can't fight it; you have to work with it."

"Then what?"

"Aim for the horizon."

Even from behind her, he could see the smile on her face at the way the wind gusted against her, the way the white cold spray danced over her, the way the wheel felt in her hands as the ship plunged forward. It was the same way he felt; that he could chart his own course out here and navigate by the stars, crossed as they may have been.

He let her guide them out into the middle of the lake where nothing was visible except lengths of water falling off to infinity so that Cam understood how the mariners of old thought the earth was flat. He tossed the anchor over and they drifted in the peace of waves and the lone bird that flew over them casting feathery shadows on the deck as if a cloud had fallen.

He sat in the shade of the masts and she sat between his legs. Her hair drifted over his lap, her arms layered over his thighs, her hands on his knees, as she rested her head back against his stomach.

"Why did you call?" Vala asked and a part of him knew why she asked then, so if he lied to her, she wouldn't see his face while he did it. Vala was no man's fool.

Cam waited a wave and then another. "When I was six," he said, "my family went to the beach in Maine. It was summer and the water up there was still cold from a coast storm, but I went in anyway. I was up the beach where I wasn't supposed to be because the water was rougher there around the point."

There was a tension in the way she touched him, tensile and thick.

"I don't remember the undertow at all. All I remember is going under and being whirled downward against the bottom where the rocks and shells scraped at my skin and the water stung at the cuts so I knew I was bleeding. I remember the darkness even from behind my closed lids and I remember drowning."

He had never told anyone the story before, not even his parents when he had limped back to them and said shakily he'd gotten cut from diving and for no known reason, they had believed him. He'd been forbidden to go back in the water the whole vacation and that had been just fine with him. He told her how being held under had felt like falling asleep against your own will and how at the end he had almost given up. It had been his first lesson in his own fragility and strength and just what he would fight for.

"The hazards of the waters are their apparent transparency," he told her. "You think because you can see through them, that you know them and that you know where the dangers are. But in the end, the undertow never comes from where you expect."

She nodded her head very slowly. "I could leave Daniel in a heartbeat, if that's what it took," she said and he knew just by the cadence of her voice that she'd had that conversation and said those words thousands of times in her head. "But I can't leave you."

"You'd leave?" Cam asked as the crushing realization hit him. She'd give up what she had always wanted, and everything she had earned for him, for this.

"No," she answered very softly. "I'd stay for you."

In those few words, Cameron Mitchell understood all there was to understand between them.

She could leave and unblemished his career as much as she could, although it would be hard because affairs with subordinates never really went away, but she would stay beside him because down in some part of her, she understood just how much he needed her.

And it was enough for her to volunteer for hell.

They'd gotten themselves caught in a net that love never should, just look at Sam and Jack. But it somehow had, and now that it was there, they had to do something, nothing, or everything.

"What if it's too much to ask?"

"I don't think it's too much to ask," he said and he now understood the space between them and how to cross it. "I don't think it's too much to want you."

"What's wrong with what you have now?" she countered and her eyes were the colour of lupines and larkspur and his sailboat waters where he was free.

"I don't have you." He realized he'd had that answer for years.

They listened to the silence of the lake and how it talked to them. The boat rocked and they felt the churning the waters under them. He rested one hand on the top of her head, urging her towards him, the other on her shoulder. She was so still and peaceful. he thought she had fallen asleep until she spoke.

"Cam?"

He shifted and leaned up.

"Whatever mistake we're making," she began and took a breath that seemed to encompass the length and breath of the sea. "It is right."

"Vala," he asked and she twisted her head to look up at him. "It's not a mistake."

She didn't say any more but when he dropped his arm down, she took his hand in hers and laced their fingers together like the woven knots sailors tied to keep ships at port.

They stayed that way until the water turned a darker shade of blue with evening and he yanked up the anchor and took the helm. He changed sails and set the sailboat on the line of waves rushing toward shore so that they too charged landward and when they saw the edges of the bay, it felt like coming home.

"The IOA knows about you and Vala." Sam told him as she stood in his office.

He looked over at Sam and wondered how she had somehow become his ally in this. Then he realized it had been years before they ever met when she had fallen in love with her CO, though she didn't think anyone had noticed, and knew that love came from strange places and most often, right beside you.

She walked him down the corridor to Landry's office.

They stopped outside the door and she reached out to him. "Whatever happens in there, remember your ideas are crazy and your tactics are questionable, you get us into more hot water than not sometimes and we'd all love to kill you at one time or other." She let go of his arm but he still felt her concern. "But remember that she loves you and you love her, and if that's the only good thing to ever come out of this place, it's more than enough."

Cam knew then that Sam wore her armor like a Victorian dress, buttoned high to her throat, but even she had learned that people rarely went for the jugular anymore and that it was the little pricks through the coats of mail that bled out more profusely than arteries, because those tiny cuts hurt worse and never killed you.

"Cam, stop burning your bridges and start walking over them."

This from the one woman who a long time ago had shared with him the wisdom that the thing about relationships was not what they were, but what they looked like. A long time ago he remembered saying he cared about what they were too.

She had changed; he never had.

He opened the door and she walked through with her head up, and if she could go on after Jack, then he could survive, too.

"Colonel" The new IOA representative greeted him as the doors whooshed shut behind them. "The man of the hour."

He sat down between Sam and Teal'c.

"Ok Colonel, tell me this one thing, all right?" he said as he paced around the table. "Are you really worth this much trouble?"

"That's a rhetorical question, right?" he shot back.

The rep straightened up and Landry stared across the table at Cam with amusement in his eyes. Cam knew only one thing; that this was worth fighting for more than surviving an undertow.

"First things first," Landry declared, "You are having relations with Vala Mal Doran?"

"Yes," he answered.

"How long?"

"Since November 17."

Sam, who had been leaning on the table, almost collapsed. It would have been funny if it had been any other day.

"That's what," the rep asked in something akin to astonishment. "Almost nine months?"

"And you never noticed a thing wrong with our behavior on base in all that time." Cam told them, leaning forward on the table

Teal'c looked down at his lap; Sam was the only one who kept his gaze. Daniel wasn't there and Cam was certain it had been planned that way.

"We've been "having relations"," he said, quoting with his hands, "for almost nine months and you're going to tell me it matters now?"

"Mitchell, stop being idealistic." Landry put in.

"Why is it that we call our generous ideas illusions and our mean ones truths?" Cam stood up and starting pacing at the other end of the table from the rep, who was now standing still with his arms crossed around his chest of his custom-made suit. "We say that we're fighting for the betterment of the galaxy, for everything that's right but when it comes to ourselves we're only to happy to turn away from it and twist it into something dirty. We didn't do anything wrong."

"You sure as hell didn't do anything right." The rep ground out.

"Is falling in love not right?" Sam batted back.

"Enough," Landry said, cutting the air with his hands. "This gets us nowhere. We'll need to meet with Daniel when he gets back tonight,"

The room emptied until the rep and Cam stood at opposite ends of the table.

"Are you worth it?" he asked and this time the question wasn't rhetorical.

"No," Cam answered and breathed. "But she is."


	7. Chapter 7

Cam only heard about that night years later when several bottles of Sam Adam's Summer Ale and a new fight had eased some of Daniel's memories from their tethers. What pieces Daniel didn't remember, Cam could only imagine from the black tar dreams that smothered him some nights when, only later, he knew all he could have lost and that the cost would have been unbearable in the worst way.

They had all been gathering for the IOA meeting when Daniel had opened the door to her apartment with the key he couldn't remember how he'd gotten, if she'd given it to him, if he'd stolen hers and made a copy, or if by some undefined magnetic force the brass trinket had stuck itself to him and he had known instinctively what it opened.

He opened the door for reasons unknown, reasons that would probably remain unknown for the rest of his life, at least to Daniel himself. Cam thought Daniel opened the door that night because somewhere behind him another door had closed, irreversibly.

Shutting the door behind him quietly, Daniel knew Vala didn't have a roommate and didn't like cats because they made her sneeze. The rooms were bizarrely cool for August and he figured the problem was that the building's heating/cooling system had crapped out. A pile of mail was balanced against all laws of physics on the arm of her couch, catalogues and a few haphazard magazines and credit card offers she hadn't yet ripped up and thrown in the trash. There was a thin brushing of dust on the little table by her couch so that when Daniel reached across it, he left tracks on the surface. Two of the plants on her kitchen windowsill had dropped dead about two months ago, the one with the big green leaves and a small viney thing that looked like dead spiders.

There were dishes in the sink, two plates, two forks, a mug, and a potato peeler. There were crusts of mould along the plates and dark blobs of something coagulated and still sticky-looking on the silverware. When he opened her refrigerator, a lone egg, three sticks of margarine, four cans of Diet Coke and a packet of batteries greeted him sullenly. She had tucked up the yellowy sheets on her bed but left two of her shirts strewn there. He hadn't seen her wear them lately.

Daniel left with the idea that perhaps she'd be where she shouldn't be and when no one answered the door there, he undid the lock with the key Cam had given him; saying to come over any time, that he meant it. But that was back when they had still been friends.

There was a note to get computer disks and Earl Grey tea on a yellow post-it written in Vala's curling handwriting hanging sideways on the wall by the door. A pile of scribbled papers with Cam's notes and a stack of CDs toppled on the little table by his blue couch, the one that overlooked the massive oil painting of the ships. He had flipped through the CDs, screening names like Rascal Flatts, Vivaldi, and Big & Rich, and then oddly enough the Beatles 1 CD. There were also two Yo-Yo Ma CDs.

A handful of dry cleaning bags were twisted over the door on their flimsy wire hangers. Her mauve silk shirt with the belled sleeves hung down on his closet over his white with white pinstripes. Cam's USAF sweatshirt lay on his dresser. There was a pair of pantyhose in the trashcan and her opal necklace was on the top of his bureau where Mitchell usually dropped his wallet and keys. There was apple shampoo in the bathtub, a half-full bottle of Clinique foundation on the toilet tank, and a purple Gilette razor on the sink that he was sure wasn't Cam's. A hairy-leafed violet in a huge saucer with the word Maude on it sat contentedly on the kitchen windowsill, blooming outrageously perfect pink flowers the colour he often imagined her laughter.

There were no dirty dishes in the sink, but several empty boxes of Thai food in the trash. And there was a note posted on the refrigerator on half a folded piece of yellow legal paper in Cam's writing: To Catch A Thief (Cary Grant!), Sat 1135, Channel 35 and then in capitals below it, underlined twice, Casablanca, Sun 1, Ch 47.

It was all so domestic and comfortable, as if they were living in it. And as he saw the load of clothes, whites, darks, and light colours heaped up on top of the dryer waiting to be folded and the note left on the refrigerator, he knew they were.

Living was what you did between translations and artifacts. Living was what happened when you stopped waiting.

He passed by the note for computer disks and Earl Grey on his way out and he almost took it with him, not as a reminder of what he was about to do, or because he was ever motivated to save his work to CD or drink tea, but because she had written it and she had never written him anything like that because he had never written her anything about Cary Grant.

Daniel had walked into Landry's office almost forty minutes later. Cam wouldn't remember it, but his eyes had seemed darker that night, the hollows beneath them deeper.

"It's over," he said and before they could all clamour. "I ended it."

Sam looked at Vala from across the table and felt her heart fall a little, knowing Daniel had done something drastic when she knew all too well what Daniel usually did. Honour wasn't the word for Daniel that night; it didn't suit him. He had fought for a cause, one that he didn't believe in, but one that needed his fight.

That was when Cam knew about the dragon's rubies.

They'd left the SGC that night separately, all of them except him and Daniel who had always been paired together by some invisible cosmic force, fanning out in spokes across the galaxy. Cam never heard the story about what really happened that night, and as far as he knew, only Landry and eventually Jack, knew; Landry the next day and Jack the next week. He could have asked Landry, but in the end, he didn't want to know, for more reasons than one. Even so, he heard whispers that disturbed him and it wasn't until years later that he got the first part of the story.

Even drunk, Daniel wouldn't tell him the rest.

Daniel couldn't tell him, because Daniel had gone to the devil and then he had walked back into that room with all of them and told them it was over, and in all the ways that mattered on the outside, it was.

Cam heard the bitterness in his tone that night and knew Daniel wasn't proud of what he'd done and if Daniel wouldn't tell him what had happened even when he was drunk, then Cam really didn't want to know. Daniel had said he'd done it because of Casablanca, but the way Cam saw it, it was about that Sunday afternoon at one o'clock when he and Vala had snuggled down deep into the couch and watched Bogey and Bergman together. It was about the note he'd left on the refrigerator two days ago that said simply, An Affair to Remember, Tonight, 12.

Daniel said suddenly as he had gotten into the cab to go home and the Sam Adams was doing its last bit of conversing, that he realized he had never been the one to carry off Guinevere's fluttering ribbons tied to the end of his jousting stick. And then he realized he wasn't even Arthur. Kay, Cam thought when Daniel's mind was too clouded by alcohol to remember anything else, or Gawain or perhaps there was even a Gatsby then, one of the nameless faceless Knights of the Round Table whose lives and loves had been lost in the legend of Lancelot's flaring, dark-hearted sun.

"Why do you love her?"

They were sitting on the steps just outside Daniel's apartment after leaving the base when Cam still had no idea at the time what had just happened except that they had been saved. They were eight of them, old cement stairs that bore the brunt of impatient feet and sullen weather. Cam remembered back when Daniel had sat on them with the team, almost a year ago. Vala had listened to almost every word he said but he had largely ignored her that night and Cam wondered when it had finally hit her that she couldn't love him forever. Then he thought about Daniel and thought this was no less a momentous occasion, one that hurt not a sliver less.

"She makes sense to me, I understand everything when I'm with her."

"What do you mean?"

"It's like when you sat in eight grade geometry and didn't understand logarithms and knew you never would and then suddenly at 34, I do. I understand why birds fly north, how Coriolis force occurs, and the way to make a perfect pancake. I understand iambic pentameter and I understand peace and vindication and hope. It clicks. It makes sense. I understand what I never thought I would."

Daniel was still angry.

"And what's going to happen when it doesn't make sense any more?" There was bitterness in his voice and Cam guessed if he'd lost what he'd always thought was his and realized it had never been, that he would have been the same way. It wouldn't ever be the same, their friendship, if it survived at all. It would simply be different, but Cam wasn't as idealistic as he used to be, and knew that few things in life were simple short of loving her.

And then Daniel relented, because relenting was the last and only thing in the world he could do, short of surrender.

"I loved her too," Daniel said at last, looking back over the street.

They had all lost so much in getting where they were, and Cam wondered sometimes, whether they didn't lose so much more than they gained. Because in Daniel, Cam saw the tale his Grandma had always told him as a child, the tale of the dragon's rubies. It was said when the slayer slit the dragon's breast, that blood did not spill forth, but rather a cascade of rubies in all cuts and carats and gushes of red. It was said that dragons did not possess blood because they could not die, and to rob them of their fortune was to take their lifeblood from them, to take their soul.

Cam imagined Daniel that way, bleeding without bleeding, bleeding rubies.

"But you did the one thing I couldn't do – you made her happy."

Vala rose off the couch as soon as he opened the door and closed it behind him so slowly that the lock snicked into place heavily.

"He's ok," Cam told her.

There were six steps of space between them but he understood how logarithms worked, how they mapped out the world and made it navigational, how they explained space really wasn't empty. There was always a way to cross it, though like early navigators exploring a world they believed was flat, it wasn't always the way you thought and the stars directed you, and mostly, it came at a cost.

She nodded her head. "And you?"

She was wearing one of his grey t-shirts so old that the lettering had come off of it and he couldn't remember the past that had chased him here to this dark place where he had found her. She had on a pair of jeans and bare feet and her skin glowed, the way the sun looked when he, even at age six, had burst to the surface after the undertow.

It was Jack who had the map of the world on his face who would explain it best in the years to come, who would wax unrepentantly poetic in the middle of a toast. Cam couldn't even remember when he had stopped believing in truth and justice and promises, but according to Jack, only one person made him remember the good in changing the world and one man's actions, even if they left a Cameron Mitchell shaped hole in the wall.

Only Vala had given him back his faith.

She crossed the space floating on logarithms and put her arms around him, sinking her head against his chest so that he knew she understood, too. He didn't doubt that she loved him. It wasn't a flashy, ostentatious love, this indefinable, undeniable thing between them; it was a quiet, restful love of solace and filled rooms and breath. It was imperfect and would never be easy, undertows never were. They knew it, hated it, and accepted it. He tilted her head and she looked up at him with her lupine and larkspur eyes. He touched his hands to each side of her face, ran his thumbs along her cheeks, and kissed her.

And as she kissed him back, he knew the price of the dragon's rubies and the sin of Lancelot, and he loved her deeply enough to change his dreams and change the world.


End file.
